Black Magic (13 page)

For this true start of his Grand Adventure, Lyle wore the Sacred Stole. Wide as one’s hand, it wrapped around the back of his neck and hung down across his chest in two parallel strips that ended just past his waist. The stole clinked with each of Lyle’s movements, for the vestment wasn’t made of cloth, but of bones, threaded with tendons dried centuries ago.

Torchlight danced across the bones, polished by the handling of ten thousand rituals. The oldest bones at the top were of creatures long gone; the canines of great saber-toothed cats, molar chips of wooly mammoths, spiraled horns of beasts forgotten to man save in myths. Other, less exotic animals completed the stole’s center, adding their power to the sorcerer’s own. The tips of the stole were finished in tips themselves, a delicate fringe of human finger bones, the bones of the sorcerer master who sired Lyle’s entrance into the black arts. The master’s noble, involuntary sacrifice to add his
whapna
to the ancestral garment had bought Lyle his immortality.

A cast-iron bookstand stood before Lyle and on it rested the thick tome of collected incantations, another posthumous donation from his former master. The parchment pages were open to the spell Lyle needed, one so infrequently used, and so specific in nature, that he did not have it memorized. Years had faded the thick, black-inked proto-Aramaic lettering to a washed-out gray.

“
Leshanoa, baklah devopah
,” Lyle began
.

As he read the text aloud, the torchlight flared. It began to burn sideways instead of upward and then reset into a rising, counterclockwise swirl. The smoke from the censers puffed thicker and followed the torchlight’s lead.

With each line of text he recited, the earth beneath him began to tremble. The great cavern below him, emptied of the water that created it, now hummed with the energy released by the magic in town. Lyle’s incantation focused these random flashes into a single, cohesive energy mass that began to mirror the counterclockwise rotation of the growing haze above Lyle’s head.

He chanted in a slow, rhythmic fashion, focused on forming each word with perfection. So long ago, this was the language of millions, now only he understood it, he and the magic that surrounded the world. Certainly, he taught his four apprentices some phrases, but did they know each one of them chanted their own portion of
darkness falls, darkness enlightens, darkness enriches, darkness frees
? Hardly. But they understood the impact, felt the power, comprehended in some way that the door they opened went somewhere man should not go. That was plenty for them to know.

The power churned below him and rose to a level demanding release. Right now, he was the path of least resistance to the rest of the world, a position he would never survive.

“
Seelak gorshna eridatu
,” he said and stretched his hands toward the communications tower in the parking lot.

The spinning, glowing mass below him sent a runner out to the tower. It bounced along a power cable conduit until it hit the tower’s base. Then it sent a surge up the superstructure like radiant blue creeping vines. They wrapped around the tower’s tip and bloomed like a flower in the sky. Threads of azure energy snapped and sparkled from the tower’s peak, the powerful byproduct of the apprentices’ magic.

Inside the plant, the incense in the censers vaporized in a puff of black smoke and a flash of neon blue. The ground went still.

“Let the games begin,” Lyle said.

No one notices the fall of an avalanche’s first grain of sand.

At Miami International, the barometric pressure had been on a slow, steady rise after a weak front passed through and was at 30.55 inches. The forecast called for a continued increase as high pressure rolled in from the north. Instead, the needle paused, wavered, and nudged back to 30.54.

Lyle’s Grand Adventure was on.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

It was the strangest thing.

Big rectangles of mildewed concrete paved the old DPW parking area. Time had widened the expansion gaps between the slabs. The department’s few vehicles, the pickup, a street sweeper, a light-duty tractor and the long-idled garbage truck, each had their own parking space and that still left room galore within the chain-link fence.

All summer, the lot had been a flat gray desert. But last week, weeds had sprouted along the expansion gap in the center of the lot. These unwanted volunteers hadn’t just poked their heads through the crack. Almost overnight, they shot up a half foot and kept growing. A few were palm fronds and several were budding pin oaks.

The oddest thing was that the strip of green did not go straight across the lot. Two-thirds of the way through, it took a right angle along another expansion joint and headed west toward Memorial Park. The rest of the joints remained barren as desert dunes.

Andy was used to spraying the lot once or twice a year in response to a few stray sprigs of green. But this profusion of plant life was unheard of. This Wednesday morning, he was giving it a double-strength shot of poison. That had to kill it.

He sprayed around the tires of the dump truck, big tires that stood well past his waist. He did not like the feel of being next to them. The big wheels reminded him of the trucks he drove years ago in Afghanistan and the fewer memories he reviewed about that place the better.
 

Andy had grown up in the south Florida heat, but even that hadn’t prepared him for his final summer in Kandahar. Each day peaked at one hundred and four degrees in the shade and there was no shade to be found. He once watched another soldier fry an egg on the hood of his M51 five-ton tractor. Sea breezes regularly cooled Citrus Glade’s summer days, but any puff of wind that crossed southern Afghanistan felt more like the rush from an open oven.

He’d enlisted and chosen this specialty, 88-Mike, officially a Motor Transport Operator, and rationalized that it was an applicable skill in the civilian world. There weren’t many want ads for 11-Bravo Infantry on the
Miami Sun-Sentinel
jobs site, but long-haul truckers were always needed. At least that’s what he told everyone.

He’d wanted to be a soldier since he was a kid, watching in awe as John Wayne tread the sands of Iwo Jima and Robert Duvall announced that “Charlie don’t surf.” But when the time came to enlist, when he sat in that office full of the real Army, knowing that he’d be deployed into combat zones in southwest Asia, he flinched. That infantryman, whose job was, as the recruiter said, “to close with and kill the enemy,” faced an opponent with the same mission statement. He could find something just a bit safer, not embarrassingly safe like computer programmer, but something with a more reasonable level of danger. Big-rig driving seemed like the ticket.

As Specialist Andy Patterson bounced along the rutted highway his last week in country, he wished he’d had more foresight. In this war, he hadn’t picked something safer. The most common enemy they faced were hidden IEDs and Andy drove a big target. Every run from Point A to Point B, no matter how short, was a nerve-wracking experience, a constant scan for fresh-dug earth and exposed wires. Everyone he passed was a potential trigger man for a buried explosive charge.
 

He felt cocooned wearing the defensive implements of war; helmet, flak vest, gloves and glasses. But all these safety items never made him feel safe. He still rode in the flimsy cab of a truck riding over a tank of diesel fuel.

The fateful day, with a week before he rotated home, he hauled a tanker of water, as inoffensive a cargo as there could be, and one he hoped the Taliban would ignore. After all, the deliveries were to villages in the province, clean water to keep kids healthy. But he and the Taliban rarely thought alike.

He rolled into one of the destination villages. Escort vehicles filled with infantry and topped with swivel-mounted machine guns bracketed his truck. When he stopped at the destination point, soldiers scattered to provide a perimeter.

The arrival drew a crowd and crowds made Andy nervous. Worse, the wizened village elder was on hand to take credit for the arrival of fresh water. A local leader’s show of American support was too often a magnet for Taliban retribution.

He rushed through the setup for the water drop, connecting the pump hose from the truck to a big rubber blivet the Army had stationed in the town. He opened the valve.

Kids materialized, as they always did, to watch this amazing process. They played around a spray of water from the blivet coupling. A few men of dubious loyalty stood along the crowd’s edge. Andy looked down to check the flow rate and when he looked up again, the men were gone. His heart skipped a beat.

A civilian woman dressed head to toe in a black burqa passed through the crowd like a cancer cell among the healthy bright colors. She closed on the village elder. Just her eyes showed.

Her eyes. Andy would never forget her eyes. They positively burned, two hot black coals focused on a target, immune to distraction, looking out from deep within the evil side of being human. He stood frozen at the tail of his truck.

The rest happened in slow motion, and each time he relived it, those replayed seconds ran like minutes. Only Andy had the angle to her actions. She reached the village elder. The children were too engrossed in the waterworks to pay her any mind. Her hand extended from beneath her future shroud. She held a black cylinder with two wires at one end, a red switch at the other. Her thumb hovered over the button.

Soldiers shouted in deep elongated syllables. Weapons snapped as riflemen brought them to bear. The slow-motion thump of his heart pounded like a countdown clock.

He was closest to the woman. In a few strides, he could have been on her, and wrenched her thumb from over the red harbinger of death. He could have brought the rifle slung across his back to bear and with one bullet ended her misguided mission. He could have shouted to the world that she had a bomb.

Instead, he ducked. He whirled backward and plastered his back against the cool steel of the water tank. His calves hit the big trailer’s tires and he held his breath. The world went back to full speed.

The sound of the explosion rolled though Andy and made his organs vibrate. The body of the suicidal woman vaporized. Nails and screws that surrounded her charge pinged against the water trailer like stones into a steel can. A wave of brown dust washed under and around the trailer, rushing by his legs like some polluted sea. Bits of bloody flesh sprinkled the ground in a hellish rain. For two eternal seconds, all was silent.

Then came the screams. Children wailed in inconsolable pain. Parents cried in horror and rushed to retrieve their dying futures. Soldiers shouted orders and radios crackled with emergency calls. One of the infantrymen lay on the ground, right leg sheared away at the knee.

The head of the suicide bomber lay on the ground near Andy’s feet, the headdress torn away to reveal the face of a young woman his age, jaw torn away, tongue exposed. The eyes that smoldered with hatred were now glazed and vacant. A woman the age to be caring for children somehow driven to kill them. It was all insane.

Around the other side of the truck, small bodies lay in pieces. The village elder was a ragged torso. Blood splattered the tanker’s side. Water spewed through shrapnel punctures in the blivet’s thick rubber and the bladder slowly deflated. In the shock of it all, Andy remembered to do the strangest thing. He shut off the truck’s water valve.

He owned this scene. He could have intervened, and these children would not be dead. He checked his hands, his feet. Undeservedly unscathed.
 

But outside damage and inside damage were two different things. Andy was back in the States in a fortnight and shredded his re-enlistment papers. He wanted to get as far away from the visions of carnage and the humiliation of his cowardice as he could. He bullshitted his way through the cursory outprocessing psych evals, left everything he owned in a barracks dumpster and came home to Citrus Glade and the DPW.

Standing amidst the newborn weeds in the DPW lot, he gave the dry-rotted tire of the dump truck a kick with his toe. When the town had been more of a town, the dump truck had made rounds once a week and picked up oversized items. That service disappeared years ago. The dump was strictly do-it-yourself.
 

The idea of putting the big truck back to work as a fee-based service surfaced, but Andy topped the list of those who opposed it. He had no desire to climb back into a cab any higher up than the pickup truck. The thought of it make his hands shake. His excuse was that the beast had two forward gears and no reverse. Transmissions weren’t cheap. The mayor agreed.

As he sprayed the final few feet of resurgent weeds, he noticed that the greenery pointed like an arrow across the street and to the small park around the World War I memorial, which bloomed like it was springtime.

There was something familiar about the pattern on the ground, the bend in the parking lot that crossed to the memorial. He couldn’t quite place it.

There wasn’t time to sweat it now. Some kids had yanked a stop sign out off CR 12. He had to replace it before someone decided to exercise their newfound right-of-way and got killed.

Chapter Thirty

Dolly felt fresh as springtime flowers.

She’d gotten eight solid hours of sleep last night, the first time in ages. But there was more to it than that. The world seemed to have more…clarity. Things looked sharper. Things felt sharper.
She
felt sharper. Her right knee didn’t hurt when she got out of bed in the morning. For whatever reason, today was going to be a great day and she was going to take advantage of every minute of it.